Saturday, December 31, 2011

﻿It's the last day of 2011 and I'm turning over a new leaf, trying to be a bit more organized about posting to my blog. I get caught up in making art and keeping house and simply forget to post, though I love to write and to share what I'm doing with my faithful readers. If you miss my presence please shoot me an email and remind me to contribute something to this blog.

I've been at work creating my online shop on etsy where I'll offer original artwork for sale. Won't you please head over to Hilltop Artworks and see what I've posted so far? There's not much listed yet but my aim is to spend several hours each week posting more things for sale.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

I'm continuing my experiments with marrying the idea of piecing quilts with collage. In Cut and Come Again I composed the design using a mixture of paper and fabric to create the feeling of a summertime zinnia from my garden. The substrate is canvas. No glue was used except for a spot here and there to tack the elements in place until they were stitched.

I Have Reasons11 x 15"Collage on PaperSOLD

I started with a collage of previously painted papers and then applied layers of acrylic paint to add depth and texture.

ElegansCollage and Acrylic on Panel12 x 12"

Working directly on Gessobord panel I painted on top of a collage of painted papers.

Winter Elk SightingCollage on Canvas Panel11 x 14"

The various white papers that depict a snowy winter storm are gesso on magazine papers. The elk red-on-black images are from a commercial paper.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Although I've shot many dozen photographs at the Oregon Coast I added lots more to my collection last weekend. The light was incredible on a late winter afternoon. Here's what it looks like in my part of the world:

I've been exploring another approach to collage, in a series I'm calling "Piecings". That's just what these collage paintings are... pieces of paper, most cut into geometric shapes and assembled, like when I made quilts from cut pieces of fabric. (This collage is 9 x 12".)

The focal strip was composed by creating a collage of long stripes which
I then cut across the grain to create stripes of small rectangles.

Quilters often use a similar technique, especially within the Seminole Patchworktradition where several stripes of colors are created and then cut apart and rearranged to create a pattern as shown here. The technique is thoroughly explained in The Complete Book of Seminole Patchwork, written by two friends of mine, Bev Rush and Lassie Wittman.

I seem most comfortable with pieces of color which I can move around to create a pleasing composition, rather than starting from scratch with a white substrate and an assortment of paints and brushes. Of course these papers started out white but first I had fun applying paint to paper, creating visual texture in a variety of ways.

Another advantage of using some of the thinner papers I've prepared as well as washi, is that I can work with layering, like the blue area above which is a commercial thin "rice"paper layered over a paper which I painted with a grid, adding visual interest and complexity to a simple design.

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.